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Assuming you have unrivaled fleet superiority planets and individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.

Most of the time I don't think the imperium has the capability for precise strikes, or are unwilling to risk expensive fleet assets for trivial gains, hence why it is generally a inquisitorial (who have the authority to command the navy into risky actions) or marines(who have their own ships) thing.

I personally like the idea of having smaller ships, (like river gun boats or monitors) which you'd deploy even if you were confident of space superiority.
An defence battery might annihilate a gunboat, but that's better than it damaging a cruiser.

Your big ships are ready to interdict enemy reinforcements to the system and the atmosphere navy cruise around in much more expendable ships, which would be effectively fire-power wise be flying titans.

Saying that if you have neutralised the enemy defence systems and are confident they don't have any hidden bases that will cause damage to the fleet, and you are confident the enemy don't/can't reinforce, yeah you might as well enter low orbit and glass them close up.
Hell you can even combat drop troops into the shadow cast by your battleships. It'd be risky, but stunningly cinematic.

 OldMate wrote:
individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.

I am ofc talking about novels where there were no shields or defence batteries. You could take "The Purging of Kadillus" as an example:

pm713 wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

 Overread wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.

Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.

There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.

Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.

You seem to have missed a fairly major point about the Imperium of Man in general and the AdMech specifically. That's not how they work.

Trying to engage Martel in discussion about background is what's known as a lost cause.

You mean the awful fanfic?

 Andersp90 wrote:

 OldMate wrote:
individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.

I am ofc talking about novels where there were no shields or defence batteries. You could take "The Purging of Kadillus" as an example:

Spoiler:

The dark angels has ghazghkull cornered for ages in a factory building. But instead of just lancing the building, they decide to waste SM lives fighting their way to him.. and he ofc ends up teleporting before they got to him..
And they could have supported their ground troops with lance strikes on multiple occasions, with the orks just running around in huge numbers.

Well tactically that is a very poor choice, better to lance the site and send a scout team to confirm the kill, just like what they do in real life. Or better yet just tell the guard to box barrage it with heavy artillery if you don't want to endanger your ship, or you know, your marines that take like ages to train and $$ to equip.

I'd personally put that down to lazy writing or a lack of understanding, or even writing yourself into a corner(in which case back the hell up and unpick the events that lead you to this impasse(or better, come up with a creative answer that no-one would think of) before you think of submitting), on the writer's behalf, I mean look at the Damacules capmagin, Tauros campgain and many more, the tactical, logistical and strategic understanding is not great, leading to many a face palm.
Hell the Catachans didn't like/use chimeras(THE most commonly manufactured guard heavy vehicle) until someone from Armageddon came and told them it was amphibious and would be great for jungle warfare(Although given it's width I'm pretty skeptical, becasue you know; trees.), and becasue you specialise in jungle warfare you should use it. Leading the unit to whole-heartedly adopt a vehicle they should have, by all rights been employing pretty heavily from the start.

This is a funny question.
Take away the ground troops of an army... How is that army even supposed to be "army" any more? How do subsue planets and quell rebelions or even defend a planet without troops?

Because it's way more interesting that way.

If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go. Ship-to-ship combat is done entirely out of visual range, and comes down to expansive suites of ECM and using very high-tech weaponry to poke small holes in floating space bubbles.

The same thing happens with hard fantasy. Swords were a last resort in most cultures, yet a mainstay in fantasy films. Historical warfare was a lot of marching, maneuvering, supply lines, political gambits, trying to keep your rabble together and fed long enough to fight the other guy. When you finally showed up at a battlefield, with the two armies trying to meet on roughly even ground so that they could both maneuver, the weapon of choice was "anything that keeps me out of reach of the enemy." Skirmishers with bows and javelins, lines of spears and shields. If you ever watched the HBO series Rome, they had a really good example of cohort warfare - make a shield wall, stab any soft bits that came around the edge. And when the whistle blows every minute, first rank tucks in and goes to the back so they can rest, because it's exhausting to fight for even that long.

Most wars are won or lost by supply lines and technology. Not exactly the stuff of heroes.

40k isn't hard. It's fluffy space fantasy, with space fantasy races and space fantasy magic. It's not (usually) about average people trying to survive the maelstrom of war where your fate is decided by an artillery piece you'll never see and an unlucky breeze. It's not about people hiding behind cover and draining their magazines firing at shadows a thousand feet away (modern warfare has something like a 250,000:1 rounds fired to actual hits ratio, counting training).

It's about a squad of supersoldiers storming a bunker, chainswords revving, so they can kill that filthy xeno scum and make sure it stays dead. It's about the horror of fighting against things beyond your comprehension with no escape but victory. It's about opposing forces coming face to face and fighting to the death without worrying about things like "supplies." The point of land combat in 40k is the same as Death Stars in Star Wars, Gerard Butler's abs in 300, cramped corridor fights against aliens in Aliens.

It's cool. It's heroic. And they'll create whatever artifice is required to make sure it happens.

Archebius wrote:
Because it's way more interesting that way.

If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.

Rocks are not free citizen!

Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).

IIRC ship battles in 40k generally do base themselves on out of sight shooting. The Imperium seems to spend a lot of time firing torpedos at where the enemy will be in X time and waiting for them to dodge or be hit.

Lord Zarkov wrote:

Archebius wrote:
Because it's way more interesting that way.

If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.

Rocks are not free citizen!

Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).

Though, if the enemy has any ground- or orbital-based defense systems, the fuel and operating expenses are paltry compared to buying a new warship.

With boarding pods still being a preference for some navies, the ranges seem to be flexible in the fiction. And I think I recall - I might be wrong here - that in many of the novelizations, they exchange broadsides close enough to the other vessels to see the damage they do, the incoming rounds, whether the other ship is on fire or crippled, etc.

My point isn't that there aren't in-universe examples of traditional warfare, but that it usually gets suborned into being more heroic as soon as the situation calls for it. Mooks might die from afar, but you better believe the hero's gonna get into fisticuffs with the sucker - the point of land combat isn't really practicality, but the fun of the narrative.

Lord Zarkov wrote:

Archebius wrote:
Because it's way more interesting that way.

If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.

Rocks are not free citizen!

Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).

Indeed. By the in-game scale that BFG provided even a point blank volley was still happening tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. Which actually makes 40k have some of the longest ranged space battles of any sci-fi.

I think in practice if you didn’t have orbital superiority/supremacy you’d probably bombard a planet with torpedoes. Fire off a couple of salvoes from outside the range of the planets defences then let them cruise to target (possibly falling the final bit under gravity if need be). Not quite as accurate as a lance strike but they’re capable of hitting a moving warship so they’ll be capable of hitting a reasonably small target on a planet with a predictable orbit.

WRT engagement ranges, there does seem to be a disconnect between how BL tends to portray space battles and the typical engagement ranges in BFG which are, as Grey Templar noted, really really far.

BL by contrast tends to play up to all the tropes from tv etc where everything is unreasonably close (though some novels like the Gothic War duology (unsurprisingly) and IIRC ADB’s Night Lords trilogy portray it more sensibly.
The Gothic War duology has most tracking be done at long range via console, though it does still have people looking through a big window on the bridge closer up.

That said, wrt ‘visual range’ given in space there’s rarely something in the way (not even the curvature of the earth you get in air combat), if your optical sensors are powerful enough you could potentially get ‘eyes on’ a target at some silly distances (though obviously you couldn’t see much at once). You’re not going to see a whole lot from that window on the bridge though, unless you’re moving out of dock (or ramming).

Andy Chambers' given scale for BFG was 1 cm = 1,000 km. Short range was 15cm or 15,000 km.

The angular size of what a viewer could see with the naked eye looking out the window can be calculated from this. A 3km long cruiser perfectly horizontal to the viewer at 15,000km is about 41 arcseconds long. That's about 2/3 the size of a soccer ball at 775m. Or in other words, tiny.

Even at BFG point blank range, there's virtually nothing to see if you look out a window with your eyes. This contrasts with what is written in the novels, but one way around that is to suppose even the bridge windows have some kind of magnification technology.

Shooting with torpedos seems a bad idea seeing as if you don't have superiority in orbit then surely that's because something else does? So that something can also shoot the torpedos, at least for Imperials.

pm713 wrote:
Shooting with torpedos seems a bad idea seeing as if you don't have superiority in orbit then surely that's because something else does? So that something can also shoot the torpedos, at least for Imperials.

In BFG, a torpedo salvo is considered an easy target for fighter small craft. That's why a fighter squadron in BFG can wipe out a whole torpedo salvo. While ship-scale or ground to orbit ship scale weaponry find it harder to hit them, a torpedo is thin-skinned by BFG standards so even 1 hit by a capital ship weapon is enough to wipe out the entire salvo.

Torpedoes might be easy to shoot down, but they're cheap weapons and nearly all Imperial ships have them so you overwhelm the enemy with volume. They can also be fired well beyond range of any retaliation.

In terms of visibility, they most definitely have holo projectors that show what the long range sensors are detecting. The "windows" themselves may also not be actual windows, but rather screens like in Star Trek that can show exterior objects. It would be much safer not to have actual windows. This sort of jibes with how Navigators are put into a pod which is that raised up above the bridge to be outside the hull of the ship, which implies that the Bridge is NOT directly adjacent to the hull.

The BFG fiction definitely shows the bridge windows as windows as there are descriptions of them taking hits, cracking, having armored shutters, etc... That doesn’t exclude them from having built in tech as they are also shown to be able to selectively darken to protect the vision of the bridge crew. The BFG novels also have bits that show an Imperial cruiser’s bridge to be at the top of the superstructure and exposed though heavily armored, such as a vignette of an Ork fighter bomber strafing a cruiser and narrowly being shot down before it slams into the bridge where the main character is watching this.

There is a hint I think of at least one Imperial cruiser secondary bridge buried within the hull, but the main bridge is the Star Destroyer like projection. BFG clearly goes for a mix of Age of Sail, and WW1/WW2 imagery and themes.

Also don't forget many of them are flying Cathedrals. Complete with huge vaulted stain glass windows. So yeah the Imperium is a mix of sci-fi - age of sail - WW1-2 - religion - 70-80-90s sci-fi pewpew and more.

I think there’s also a bit of looking at modern warships which still have bridges sat on the top with big glass windows as well as planes and space shuttles which have big glass windows in the cockpit and thinking “oh, well obviously our space ships would need them too” without really considering how space combat would actually affect its utility.

And of course once you’ve established that 40k ships have bridges with big glass windows that’s then canon which everyone else needs to fit in around...

It's not like they're the only universe with that weird decision nor does it seem strange for the Imperium.

pm713 wrote:
It's not like they're the only universe with that weird decision nor does it seem strange for the Imperium.

True, true.

Given the Imperium actively enforces rule of cool over common sense it’s less jarring than in other sci fi which really should know better...

Usually the IoM wants the planet to be in one piece, specially if they are the defender. There is not much point in bombarding the enemy if whatever remains to be conquered or reclaimed is rubble.